A Poisoned Mind (27 page)

‘Carl,’ she said, blinking and moving so she could get a better view. Today he was wearing a suit again, but his hair was as dry and untidy as ever and he looked even more worried. ‘Thank you for coming.’

‘I had to be near here anyway.’ He lowered himself to the stone parapet beside her, but he didn’t say anything else.

After a while, Trish said: ‘Why are you so quiet? I thought you were going to come clean at last.’

‘Come clean?’ He sounded outraged. ‘About what?’

‘About how you got embroiled with Greg Waverly and Ben Givens in their campaign against the chemical-waste industry.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘And why the three of you picked the benzene tanks at Low Topps Farm for Maryan Fleming and Barry Stuart to blow up.’

‘You’re mad,’ Binachini said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I’ve never wanted to blow anything up.’

He forced himself to his feet and walked hurriedly away from the fountain, only to stop, turn on his heel and come back. He opened his mouth, then shut it again and took off his spectacles and tucked them in his breast pocket so he could rub his eyes. They looked so red he’d clearly been at them before. At last he sat down again, with his hands clamped to the white stone either side of him. His muscles were so tight, Trish almost expected to hear them humming.

‘If you didn’t come to tell me the truth, well away from listening ears, why did you agree to meet?’ she said more kindly.

‘I had to stop you blabbing those names over the phone. Haven’t you any idea what you’re risking?’

‘No. Tell me.’

‘Who the hell are you? And who are you working for? I know you do have a protégé called Jay Smith because I did some checking after we spoke this morning. But why d’you think I might give you information about Fleming and Stuart?’ He waited for a nanosecond, then added unconvincingly: ‘Whoever they are.’

‘Carl, why are you so hostile?’ Trish said.

‘Can you really not know?’ He stared at her with a kind of dread that told her how much of his aggression was driven by fear; not just wariness but real physical gut-churning fear. ‘Are you fiddling with this completely blind?’

‘I must be,’ she said, briefly touching one of his rigid hands. He whipped it away.

‘Because I haven’t a clue about what’s making you so scared,’ she went on.
‘Haven’t
you been working with Ben Givens and Greg Waverly?’

He raised one hand to cover his eyes. She waited.

‘This is lunacy,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve had no contact with Givens since the libel case. And I have never heard of Greg Waverly.’

‘But you must have heard of Maryan Fleming and Barry Stuart,’ Trish said. ‘Because they organised the corporate-bonding weekends for GlobWasMan at their climbing school in Swanage.’

‘Oh, Christ!’ he muttered.

‘Carl, you have to explain. Otherwise I’m going to do unintended damage as I trample around. If you don’t know about the connection between Givens and Greg Waverly, what’s the significance of Fleming and Stuart in your life?’

‘All I can say is that I came across those two names in the accounts at GlobWasMan.’

‘So what? They should be there. As I said, they provided corporate-bonding weekends.’

‘Except they didn’t,’ he said. Now he sounded exhausted, as though he’d run out of defences.

Again she had to wait. This time the silence stretched on and on. The muscles around his mouth were jumping as though he was clenching and unclenching his jaw. Come on, she thought, come
on.

The wind got up suddenly and blew the fountain’s spray towards them. Trish could feel it on the back of her head. Carl straightened up, took a pristine handkerchief from his pocket and took off his spectacles to wipe the lenses. Once they were dry again, he spent another minute or so fastidiously wiping his face and then his hands.

‘The dates didn’t work,’ he said at last. ‘Not for the most recent weekend anyway, and probably not for some of the earlier ones either. No one was available to go. Never would have been. So the money was paid out for some other reason, just disguised as payment for another directors’ climbing weekend.’

Trish felt as though she were watching a film of shattering glass run backwards so that the mess of flying debris was miraculously sucked back together again to show the full, unbroken pane.

She knew what the payment must have been for. And she thought she knew who had been threatening Barry when he’d asked for more money. And what he’d meant when he’d told Maryan she could take her chance with Ken Shankley if she didn’t flee to New Zealand.

‘What did you think the money was for?’ Trish tried to sound mildly interested and not at all suspicious.

He was biting his lips so hard she expected to see blood at any minute.

‘It wasn’t the only odd payment.’ You’d have thought the words hurt his mouth from the way they twisted up his face. ‘Once I’d found it, I started to look for more. You see I shouldn’t ever have known anything about it because I didn’t deal with the nitty-gritty of the accounts; I only saw this entry because there was a struggling temp in the department one day and I was the only person around in the office to answer her question about which code to give the invoice. I had to make a search to find out and that’s when I started to see the anomalies in the books.’

‘Why did they worry you so much?’

He frowned, as though he couldn’t believe anyone could be so obtuse, then whispered: ‘Money-laundering.’

‘What?’ Trish felt her jaw slacken as she stared at him.

‘It had to be. And it explained everything. All the oddities and strange remarks and weird threats.’

‘You mean you think GlobWasMan isn’t just cleaning up chemical waste but dirty money, too,’ she said, needing to be sure of what he was telling her.

‘Exactly. And dirty money means organised crime. Drugs. People-smuggling. The kind of men who kill anyone who might get in the way of their profits. I got out as soon as I could. And I reported them to the Fraud Squad. I had to; otherwise I risked a prison sentence, too, and what would have happened to my family then?’ He shivered.

‘What is it, Carl? What happened?’

‘When I told Ken Shankley, the chairman, that I had to resign because of my wife, he looked at me without saying anything. That’s when I knew he knew I knew.’ Bianchini
swallowed hard, as though he had something huge and painful in his throat that had to be choked down. ‘Then he went, “You know what’ll happen to her if you talk, don’t you?”’

Trish couldn’t bear to leave him in this much agony.

‘Carl,’ she said. ‘Look at me.’

After a while he did, and she said with great deliberation:

‘You’re letting your nightmares overcome your judgement. The sums you found in the accounts must have been too small to be of any interest to a money-laundering gang of violent organised criminals. Their profits are vast, far too big to be hidden in a business the size of GlobWasMan.’

He shook his head. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘Yes, I do. For instance, how much was the payment to Fleming and Stuart?’

‘Only five grand. But that’s how money-laundering works: dozens, hundreds, thousands of small transactions that all look innnocent.’

Five thousand pounds, she thought. John Fortwell was killed for the price of a second-hand car.

‘I must go.’ She stood up.

He grabbed her wrist with both hands, clutching at her. Even if there’d been nothing else, that gesture would have shown her how near the edge he was, how eaten up with irrational anxiety.

‘You won’t use my name, will you? Nowhere? Never?’

‘I never will, Carl.’

She left him and walked quickly towards the southeastern corner of the square. Watching the traffic move at a sluggish crawl around the lower edge of the square as she waited for the lights to change, she thought of Angie Fortwell’s hatred that first day in court.

Being able to tell her the truth about what Maryan Fleming and Barry Stuart had done, and why, and for whom, might assuage some of it.

Her phone rang.

‘Trish Maguire.’

‘Trish, it’s me.’ Antony’s voice was reassuringly vigorous. ‘I need you. Now. I know you can’t have any work to do because Steve’s phoned to say you’re adjourned. And you can’t be itching to help David again because he must be in school. Please.’

‘Oh, all right. I’m in Trafalgar Square. I could be with you in about ten minutes.’

He might even be useful, she thought, so long as he didn’t rant at her for taking such an unorthodox line with her work.

Visitors were milling about in the hospital foyer, waiting for the end of the post-lunch quiet period up in the wards. Trish had forgotten about it. But she wasn’t going to waste any more time.

Hurrying figures in white coats passed by with stethoscopes flying. Bored children ran about, screeching, while their parents looked on in tired resignation and elderly visitors with outrage. Trish made for the lifts.

The brushed steel doors opened and a crowd of nurses rushed out. Trish took their place, barely noticing the other five or six people who followed her, and pressed the button for the tenth floor.

The first thing she saw as she emerged was Jay’s familiar figure slumped on one of the orange plastic chairs outside the entrance to the two main orthopaedic wards.

Today he was wearing torn jeans and a round-necked grey T-shirt that did nothing to make his screwed-up blob
of a face and aggressively ugly haircut look less threatening. She’d taken two steps back before she realised what she was doing and stopped herself.

He looked so vulnerable. And so unhappy.

There was a messy bunch of evergreen branches and three wilting roses in a neatly folded cornet of newspaper on the chair beside Jay. The mixture of the bedraggled flowers and the tidiness of their holder reminded her of everything she liked about him and everything George and David admired. Her sneaking wish to get him out of their lives seemed cruel.

He was looking vacantly at the far wall and kicking one clean trainer against the chair leg in a disturbing, rhythmical way that made her think of news footage of damaged children in third-world orphanages.

‘Jay?’ she said at last, leaning down a little towards him so that he would hear her quiet voice. ‘Are you on your way to see your mother?’

He looked up and smiled like a newly woken baby sensing a feed, as though there’d been no estrangement, no attempted arson. He stopped kicking and sat straight. He wasn’t nearly as tall as David, but as he stretched she remembered he was fourteen: no longer a child; barely even a boy. Others of his age were already fathers. Could the damage he’d suffered for so long be mended or was it already too late? At what age
should
you lose the get-out-of-jail-free card?

‘Hi, Trish. Yeah. But I can’t go in till the cops’ve finished with her. What are you doing?’

‘I’m visiting a friend. How’s your mother?’

‘Still too bad to come home. Her skull’s broken, as well as her ribs.’

‘I’m sorry. And I’m sorry I didn’t see you on Friday as I’d expected,’ she said, determined to get to the bottom of the cinema episode. ‘The day you and David went to see
Henry V’
.

He looked up at her from under his lids as the old sullen expression settled over his features, blotting out the intelligence.

‘Why?’

‘Jay, what happened then? I know David couldn’t have made up that story about you setting fire to your socks, whatever the cinema manager said when George rang him up to check.’

He said nothing.

‘D’you think David’s got a good enough imagination to think up something like that?’

Jay met her eyes. A faint smile brought back hints of awareness to his expression.

‘I don’t either,’ she said.

‘I wasn’t going to admit it though, was I? Stupid, innit? When they come looking for me I took my bag and hid in the toilets, then I went back and saw the rest of the film.’ He swung his legs again, whacking the heel of his trainer against the chair leg. The noise or the vibration must have appealed to him because he did it again, and again. His face returned to vacancy.

She would have a lot to say to him if David wanted him back, but until she knew that, there was no point even trying. She left him and went to find Antony.

He was sitting in his chair beside the bed, wearing an ordinary neck collar now instead of the cage and fully dressed in dark corduroy trousers, a checked shirt and a heavy cashmere cardigan that was knitted in a complicated
cable pattern. She’d never seen him in such informal clothes, but they were as much of an improvement as the neck collar. His blond hair seemed thinner than usual and his face was netted with new lines, but he no longer looked like a victim.

‘Hey! Congratulations, Antony.’ She bent to kiss his cheek. ‘Does it still hurt?’

‘Not too bad, but they’re getting a bit mean with painkillers these days. The physio’s helping, though. I’m due out tomorrow. Liz is coming to pick me up at ten-thirty, after the consultant’s ward round.’

‘Fantastic news.’

‘So tell me what you’ve been up to.’

She filled him in on everything that had been happening and most of her suspicions about the case, distracted at one moment by the bustling departure of two uniformed police officers.

‘They’ve been interviewing the assault victim,’ Antony said. ‘They’re the third lot today.’

‘Why so many?’

‘They want her to ID their suspect from photographs because she’s too ill to go to the nick. First time, she wasn’t making much sense; second time, she started yelling and swearing at them. This last round has been quieter.’ He grinned. ‘I was reduced to offering my services, via the prettiest of the nurses, during the shouting. But the answer came back that she didn’t need no interfering brief telling her what to do.’